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Born and gaining his culinary skills in France, Loïc Dablé, who is of Ivorian descent considers himself a Pan-African chef.

After working in several high-end hotels and restaurants, chef Dablé decided to relocate to his home country of Côte d’Ivoire, where he currently runs Migrations, an Abidjan based restaurant that serves a large variety of healthy Pan-African dishes during the day as well as at night.

What makes chef Dablé’s Migrations interesting is, it is not just a restaurant, it is also a social project whose focus is to help “reintegrate local migrants,” his website explains.

Additionally, Dablé is also the co-founder of the Karmelle & Loïc Dablé Foundation, a Nonprofit Organization working to reduce unemployment among the youth and women as well as illegal migration through Pan-African food empowerment.

A former juror of the Pan-African culinary show “Star Chef,” Dablé has observed the evolution and changes in the style of cooking in homes of his home country. But what he is vehemently against is the type of seasoning being used lately.

“There is an evolution that grieves me enormously, which is painful to me, it is the arrival of the cube Maggi. I think it is a product that is terrible and that should not even have had its place in African cooking habits. These cubes are a concentrate of salt. You do not necessarily know what’s inside and the excess oils cause different arterial diseases and others,” he said in a recent interview.

Photo via Loic Dablé on Facebook

“I think it’s a very bad development, and I think our cooks should be making the effort today to remove those products. A good yassa chicken does not need a surplus of oil! The cook or the restaurant who makes you recipes with oil that exceeds or overflows, it is not good, it is not correct,” he added.

Dablé believes that a lot of work needs to be done to educate Africans about the need to enjoy using home-grown products.